Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “We can’t afford to fight here. Every minute we stay, every minute they hunt us, we’re putting the civilian population in danger.”

  “Then we disband.” Vifra looked among the others, searching for agreement. “If we can’t do much damage anyway, we go underground. Become rebels again. Spread out and hold on until something changes.”

  “What if that something is Imperial reinforcements instead of New Republic ones?” Carver asked. “There’s a reason we never scatter without a plan to reunite. We wouldn’t be in this mess if half the company weren’t in space.”

  The Houk shifted, glowering at Carver and cracking open his massive jaw before being interrupted by Junior. The human had set his toy aside and was manipulating the hologram. “What about the other side?” Junior asked.

  The holoimage of the planet spun fast enough to render the image a blur before re-forming on the Scar of Troithe—the lifeless, mined-out continent that had provided the raw materials for the city.

  “No civilians to worry about,” Carver conceded. “But what are we supposed to do out there?”

  The Sullustan squatted beside Junior at the holo display, rapidly adjusting settings and magnifying the desolation. Something blinked among the rocky plains and chasms. “The last of the mining megafacilities was never scrapped. The shaft goes kilometers underground—it was used for core drilling and bulk freighter launches decades back.”

  “Is it deep enough to take hits from a TIE bomber and stay intact?” Vifra asked.

  “Take a look.” The Sullustan shrugged.

  The arguing resumed as the Sullustan pulled up what outdated technical readouts were available on the public network. Carver suggested that retreat was neither wise nor necessary but couldn’t address Wyl’s concerns regarding civilian casualties. Twitch appeared disinterested until Junior raised the question of transporting the company across such a long distance, at which point she became viciously opposed to the “death march” she anticipated would destroy her squad. But the mining facility appeared defensible. “Maybe we can get there without anyone noticing,” Junior said. “Maybe we can launch attacks from there.”

  “Hit-and-run strikes from a safe position could open things up,” Carver conceded. “Buy time, give the locals room to maneuver. If we give you flyboys a secure fallback position, you think you can take on the foe?”

  Wyl looked to Nath, but Nath waited for him. Cautiously, Wyl worked through the logic aloud. “Every time we’ve been beaten by Shadow Wing, it’s because they chose the terms of engagement. They’re good at what they do, but they’re not invincible. Even so”—he spoke without flinching—“we’ve only got two starfighters.”

  Carver sighed loudly. He’d begun to speak when Nath interrupted: “We don’t need starfighters. We just need airpower. Maybe it’s time to lower our standards.”

  “Meaning what?” Carver asked.

  “Mister Lark here used to fly birds on his homeworld,” Nath said. “Big city–world like Troithe, you going to tell me there’s nothing that’ll lift off?”

  The Sullustan and Vifra spoke almost simultaneously. “Civilian airspeeders,” the Sullustan said, “or maybe some rusting police cruisers from before the Empire, but—”

  “We’ve got portable cannons, heavy rifles.” Vifra screwed up her face. “I can weld and wire. We’re still talking about vehicles that can’t match TIEs for speed or firepower.”

  Nath grinned, showing white teeth. “TIEs aren’t much match for an X-wing, either. Like Wyl said, we choose the terms of engagement. We make sure we’ve got a clear line of retreat. We build an air unit of our own, we operate from the megafacility, we make a difference.”

  “Say we get you a unit.” Everyone looked to Carver now. “You can lead it?”

  “Hell no.” Nath leaned back and kicked out his legs before jutting a thumb at Wyl. “That’s what he’s here for.”

  * * *

  —

  They didn’t speak in private again until late afternoon, when Wyl caught up to Nath as the older man readied the Y-wing for flight. “Tell me why,” Wyl said.

  Nath squatted on the vessel’s hull, roughly jiggling T5 back and forth until the droid locked into the socket. He didn’t pretend not to understand. “Maybe I didn’t want to spend the day looking over personnel reports, deciding who among the ground-pounders is qualified to fly.”

  “You’d be better at it than me.” Wyl craned his neck, trying to make out Nath’s expression in the dim light. “I’ve handled field command before, when I had to. You’ve run a proper squadron. And you know these people better than I do; they love you. They’ll be glad to follow you.”

  “They do love me,” Nath said, “because I’ve put in more hours than you have. But they respect you already—not just because we’ve saved their butts, but because you’re ‘the Polynean.’ Turns out Meteor Squadron’s been sharing your legend.”

  Wyl laughed. Nath didn’t. The Y-wing emitted a metallic grinding noise and began to hum. “I’d believe that you’ve been sharing my legend. Again, the question is why?”

  “Put it this way: I don’t want command of these people. If you don’t take it, no one does.”

  Wyl tried to read the man. He couldn’t see the reasoning but he recognized the inflexibility. “All right,” he said. Whatever the full truth was, Nath wasn’t wrong. “That mean you’re taking my orders, too?”

  “That’s the plan.” In an instant the charming pirate, the con man, returned. “I’ll see you in a while, with ships in tow. Unless Shadow Wing finds me first.”

  III

  Quell woke unable to breathe or feel her limbs. There was pressure on her chest and pressure on her back, and her attempts to escape whatever squeezed her were rebuked with sharp pain down her spine. She realized she was lying facedown and centimeter by centimeter she rose, forcing bruised fingers—she could see her hands, if not fully sense them—against unstable metal paneling until the pressure alleviated and she could suck in lungfuls of thin air.

  When oxygen had returned to her brain, she saw that she was still on the bridge of the freighter. The pilot’s seat had uprooted from the deck and lodged her body between itself and the main console—perhaps a stroke of luck, since the transparent metal of the viewport had torn open in three places, leaving jagged halos that could have easily impaled a body. Sand the color of blood had poured inside through the gaps, and a cold, high-pitched wind whistled and fondled Quell’s torso and head.

  The breeze alerted her to a sore spot on her temple where her hair felt glued in place. She didn’t need to touch her face to know that the locks were matted and sticky with gore. Her memory-chip necklace, meanwhile, had cut into her chest and left a stinging gash.

  She was alive. This was the most surprising of her findings.

  She attempted to pull away from seat and console, discovered she was still constrained by the safety harness, and spent several minutes disentangling herself after concluding that the automatic release didn’t function. The process dizzied her but allowed her to confirm that all of her limbs were operative and her blood loss was under control. If she had broken bones—and she suspected she did, given she broke more easily than she bruised—they were bones that weren’t supporting anything vital: Fractures in ribs or fingers. Maybe a shoulder.

  She hoped not a shoulder this time.

  She eased out of the cockpit and into the access corridor. The entire vessel was canted ten degrees or more, which forced her to find footholds for every step. She was intent enough on maintaining her balance and fighting down bile that she was two meters along the hallway before she realized the entire port side of the ship was gone—bulkheads and compartments torn away, interior exposed to the same sand and darkness as the cockpit.

  She considered the implications—irreparable damage to the freighter, to start with—and
filed the facts away.

  Her next stop was the starboard cabin where she’d left Adan and IT-O. She might have called out if she’d been feeling up to speech, but her jaw ached and the bile was still attempting to rise. With no working lighting and no starlight penetrating the ship’s depths, she had to feel her way around the last bend and wait for her eyes to adjust upon reaching the room.

  A jumble of geometric lines resolved into ruins. The bunks had toppled and a mass of tubing had ripped free from the wall, burying most of the floor. Quell spotted Caern Adan’s hand and traced it to his body. The intelligence officer’s form was covered by one of the bunks but appeared intact. Quell couldn’t tell if he was breathing; she knelt to rest as much as to take a pulse.

  Adan’s hand was warm. Quell felt the rhythm of his heartbeat.

  You could leave him.

  The thought surprised her, but she followed its course. He had betrayed her. Exposed her crimes to her squadron. Ensured she would have no future in the New Republic or anywhere else. She’d chosen to let him live when she’d rescued him from his captors, but now?

  Now she had a second chance.

  She groaned in misery as she raised the bunk, wedging her knee to prop it in position and gripping Adan under his shoulders. She pulled, knowing she was liable to exacerbate any injuries he might have; but leaving him buried couldn’t be any better. She rested and caught her breath once she’d freed him, then felt the body sliding on the canted floor and heard creaking metal. All the way, then, she thought, and dragged him out into the access corridor and onto the red sand.

  The wreckage of the freighter provided shelter against the wind; a strong breeze raised plumes that crossed the arid plane like phantoms. The bright starlight was filtered through the clouds of the debris field, but the fiery iris of Cerberon’s eye crested the horizon like an obscene rainbow, fierce enough to see by. Past the crater wall created by the ship’s crash the red desert appeared endless, rolling into low dunes no taller than Quell’s knees. It was as if a sea of blood had been locked in stasis, its waves paralyzed and left to dry until all that was water was now dust.

  Quell sat beside Adan and realized she was breathing heavily from the effort of moving him. She reassessed her condition: Her garments were torn, and cuts and abrasions covered the backs of her hands. She’d instinctively stretched one leg out and tucked the other beneath her, contorting her body to reduce the worst of the pain in her spine.

  She was gathering the strength to return to the ship when Adan shifted beside her. He lay on his back and rolled onto a shoulder before dropping again.

  “Where?” he breathed.

  “We’re still in the debris field,” Quell said. She coughed upon finishing the sentence, smelled a foulness in her breath, and spat a few grains of sand. “It was land here or nowhere.”

  Adan squeezed his eyes shut, reopened them, and carefully turned his head. “Ito?”

  Quell was surprised to realize how little she’d thought about the droid since waking. “I don’t know,” she said.

  She mentally retraced her path through the ship. With most of the freighter gone there weren’t many places for the droid to hide. She searched memories of the rubble for the black sphere or the light of the droid’s photoreceptor. She found nothing.

  “The ship came apart on descent,” Quell added. She looked to the horizon again. “I don’t think Ito is with us.”

  Adan shuffled backward, propping himself on his elbows and then his palms. “We need to find it,” he snapped, though his voice was too weak to carry. “Figure out where Ito’s gone immediately!”

  She recognized the tone and flinched. She was in Traitor’s Remorse again; aboard the Buried Treasure again; in the ready room of the Lodestar being put down by a man who saw every failure as rebellion. The Adan whose company she’d grown fond of—the man she’d shared meals with on Troithe, worked with to sway the general, and laughed with on cold mornings while her squadron was flying—was suddenly gone.

  Quell stared into white eyes in a dark face.

  “Not now,” she said, but she kept her voice soft and lowered her gaze to the sand. “We’re not in any condition to go out there.”

  Adan’s breath came quickly as the strain of staying upright appeared to settle into his bones. “I won’t abandon my droid.”

  “If the droid is offline, leaving it alone a few hours more won’t make any difference.” She rose onto her knees, squatting beside Adan. “We should salvage anything we can use to survive—food, water, maybe a tarp, anything resembling a medkit—then make camp and see to our injuries. There’ll be time to look for the torture unit tomorrow.”

  There was no force in her words. She doubted she had the strength for defiance. Yet she saw the panic burn off Adan’s face and be replaced by something colder and calmer and just as bitter.

  “Tomorrow,” he agreed.

  “I like Ito, too,” she murmured as she rose to her feet.

  They spent the next hour searching the wreckage in silence. Quell moved more swiftly than Adan but she noticed him doing what he was able—albeit usually from a seated position. They found little worth having, with Quell’s prize being a mini vaporator—enough to supply water for one person each day in an ideal planetary atmosphere (less if Quell’s luck held steady). The crushed but in-the-wrapper mealpacks Adan located in the cockpit would provide a solid week of sustenance if rationed carefully, and would potentially offer additional hydration. The arsenal Quell had taken from the Lodestar had disappeared; she suspected the hole in the cockpit viewport might be connected.

  They made camp around the side of the ship, as far from the wind as they could get, and hung sheets to form a thin and ineffective tent. They lay on a tarp beside each other, close enough to share body heat but turned so that Adan stared at the freighter’s broken hull and Quell looked at rippling fabric. She was tired but she doubted she could sleep.

  “What happened to Kairos?” Adan asked in barely more than a whisper.

  You asked that already, she wanted to say. That was the first thing you asked when I saved your life.

  “She was with the medics. She’s alive now. Unless something happened.”

  Unless Shadow Wing had obliterated her. Unless Quell’s efforts to give her squadron a chance had failed.

  She began to think about what might have occurred after Soran Keize had savaged her freighter and flown on to the battle over Troithe. But wondering whether Lark and Tensent and Chadic were still breathing wouldn’t help her now. Speculating whether the Lodestar was intact wouldn’t help, either.

  “Yrica,” Adan said.

  She grunted in acknowledgment, then thought to say: “What?”

  “The mission was yours. If anything happens to her—if anything happens to Kairos—I will hold you responsible.”

  Adan said nothing after that, and Quell shifted, digging her head into the sand through the tarp.

  She wasn’t concerned. What more could Adan do to her?

  CHAPTER 15

  FANTASIES OF GRANDER DAYS

  I

  In the shrouded lands between sleep and waking, Chass na Chadic found she was young again. The faraway singing that reached her ears was the singing she’d heard every day since her eighth birthday, when her mother had insisted they pack their few belongings and trek to the Benevolence Tower on the outskirts of New Vertica in the sprawling city of Nar Shaddaa.

  The tower was different from anywhere they’d lived before, and what Chass remembered most about Benevolence was the whiteness—illumination so foreign to the smog-and-neon streets, so pervasive that her eyes hurt at the end of the day. Where windows had once looked into gutters, the inhabitants had bolted ivory cloth or, in a few cases, grown trellises of thick green vines. This was so no one could look in, Chass was told by her mother—so no one could s
py on them and learn the secrets of the Inheritors of the Crystal. It had taken Chass two years to realize it was really so no one could look out.

  But during her early days in Benevolence, before she’d grasped that her mother had dragged her into a cult amassing weapons and followers for a spice-crazed lunatic—a man who’d decided a charismatic smile and a replica kyber crystal were the basis for a religion—Chass had felt a peace she’d rarely experienced since. She’d been treated as equal to the adults (which seemed exploitative now, but at the time had felt like a privilege), and had cooked meals and repaired malfunctioning septic tanks and polished the crystal and cataloged weapons with the rest of them. When her mother spent increasing time with the Prophet, she ignored it because, after all, what did she need a mother for? They were all family among the Inheritors.

  She’d truly believed that. And she’d excused the undercurrent of dread, the constant fear of failure (fear of the consequences of failure), as something that was part of all families. Part of what it meant to love a community and feel responsible for its fate.

  Eventually she’d learned better.

  Nonetheless, while Chass had lived in harsher places before and after Benevolence, she remembered how unbearably alone she’d felt in the days after fleeing. How it felt to be shunned as an unbeliever, disconnected from the cosmic Force. She’d told herself that she no longer accepted the Prophet’s teachings, but she had believed, in her bones.

  When Chass woke after failing to repair her B-wing and nearly suffocating in the void of space, she heard singing—and for a moment she believed again. It felt glorious.

  * * *